MEMOIR: The Outboard Motor Incident [Major Rewrite)

MEMOIR: THE OUTBOARD MOTOR INCIDENT

My dad was furious—again. This was just the latest. Certainly the most noteworthy. He was standing in the waist-deep salty waters of the Bunbury Estuary, and he was holding an outboard motor to his chest. It was a bulky, heavy bastard of a thing, and Dad was keen to dump it in the nearby aluminium boat. He just needed Mum, who was holding the rope tether line, to pull the boat over to where Dad was standing, in the water, with that engine. Yelling up at Mum. Yelling at everyone. Dad was in a mood. He was like this. Even without a heavy outboard motor. Even without the Bunbury Estuary. Even at home.

Especially at home, because there nobody could see or hear.

Note: Dad was never a drunk, and was never an abuser. Never. He was always a decent man with a terrible temper, and an even worse illness. He was under various forms of treatment for that illness, but in those days, the Sixties, the options available were not much good. Worse than blunt instruments. Dad knew there was something wrong. Ever since he was 18 he knew there was something wrong, deep inside. He had been in the army before he met my mum. He had been married at the time to another woman, but she wanted a divorce. The split drove the young man who would later become my dad to attempt suicide. He was later dishonourably discharged, the poor bugger.

By the time he met my mum his illness, he felt, was more or less stable, the current treatment he was on was working, so he never told her about it. But she found out the hard way. Dad, as I say, had black moods, and anger, tears, and days when he couldn’t face his job. It was hard just getting through each day. Harder still in those days than these days. Now there’s a bunch of services and places you can access or go where you can get some level of help. But back then you didn’t even have words in your head, the actual language you needed, to express the thought, that you were in trouble, that your engines were on fire, you were gonna crash, and you don’t know what to do.

Dad often had no idea what to do. He did the best he could. But sometimes he couldn’t. He couldn’t get out of bed. All he could do was sleep and smoke and sometimes cry. I didn’t know too much about this at the time. Mum has told me more since. At the time I was dragging my sorry carcass off to school each day, knowing what awaited me. All I knew about Mum and Dad was that Dad was sick. Sometimes he vanished in the dead of night to secret hospitals. It was like in a spy novel. One thing you knew for sure: nothing seemed to help. When he came home from the secret spy hospitals he always seemed more haunted, more hollowed out, more wretched.

It was not surprising that Dad was angry. Things had not gone that well. Everything had been a huge struggle. Just getting through a day, every day, was a struggle. And all the time, there’s your moody, troubled son staring at you like you’re the problem, like he’s lost respect. Like he doesn’t understand what you’re dealing with, and you could just kill him, but he’s your boy, your life, what you live for.

It was incredible to think he and had gone through years of our lives fundamentally not understanding each other, just bumping past each other in the hallway, but that’s it.

Anybody would be angry in that world.

But angry people can’t keep jobs. And Dad had a dreadful time with jobs. He was great at the jobs. What he couldn’t do with marine engines wasn’t worth doing. His services were in demand among the boating set around Perth and up and down the coast. “Can Ken come and have a look at my boat this weekend, please?” And he did his best to accommodate as many of these extracurricular gigs as he could. We got to see a lot of Mandurah in the Sixties and Seventies this way, memories that live with me today, and inform the visits Michelle and I have made there since we’ve been married and had our honeymoon there, and no many wonderful holidays since.

But just as we got to see a lot of seaside Mandurah back then with Dad travelling far and wide to work on the boats of mates, we also went to seaside Bunbury, further south, with its own Estuary.

I started this story about my Dad with him, bloody furious, clutching an outboard, yelling at Mum, who was up on a walkway, holding the rope, distracted by the antics of us kids, and so allowed the boat to drift.

Dad was angry, but yelling at Mum, yelling at me, yelling abuse at the bloody outboard, it was all a mask. He was yelling at himself. He was inadequate. He was no good. If he was better at his job he wouldn’t need to take on bullshit jobs like this. He could spend his weekends with his family. He could, God, what a thought! He could enjoy himself! He might go beach fishing! He might take a boat out and just potter about, maybe let out a little trolling line, see what might be interested.

This would never, ever happen. Dad knew it. Standing there in the waist-high waters of Bunbury Estuary on his precious day off, doing a favour for a mate, an outboard motor clutched to his chest and getting heavier by the moment, waiting for Mum to tow the tinny over so he could dump it—he knew how everything would all play out. He would never get better at this job. He tried. He was always studying those workshop manuals. That’s how he got his first job in marine engines: he was shown a bench covered in the stripped-down parts of an engine, and a copy of the workshop manual, and all the required tools. He was then told to rebuild it to working condition.

And he did. Because he was good at it.

I never understood until quite late that my dad loved me. Proper treatment had transformed him. It was the making of him, as it was for me. And as it was for me, it took many years for his treatment to take hold, to settle, for things to become stable. Those were hard years. We fought often in thatmtime. There was yelling and door-slamming and angry brooding and wishing I could take back things I had said.

There was a strange period, when I was around 17, when my dad took overdoses of his medication sometimes. Not with serious suicidal intent so much (though the first couple of times we did worry greatly about that) as the idea that he felt badly messed up inside, so if he made himself sufficiently ill he would end up at the hospital, where they would have to fix him. This happened several times. He never got the fixing he was looking for. In time he gave up doing it. We were all grateful. But for a while I was very angry about it. I lost a lot of respect for my dad. Where was the flashy larrikin guy who raced speedboats? Little did I realise, but he was still there, but trapped inside, drowning.

I feel lousy remembering all this. It was a dreadful time for all of us. Mum had it worst of all. She was the one who had a sick husband and a sick son. The sick son was either an inpatient at D20 or an outpatient, heavily involved still with the hospital. That went on for a couple of years, until I was 18, when they let me go.

And one day in the middle of all this, while I was in D20, Mum had a heart attack, and wound up in the Emergency Room.

I was sitting in the Art Room with a big wodge of clay, doing my dreamy thing, calm and quiet and happy, sitting in front of one of the big windows with its view across the carpark to A Block. A male nirse appeared and sat down next to me. He very gently introduced the topic that my mum was in the Emergency Department, just over there in A Block, with a suspected heart attack. He spoke very softly, and with extreme watchful care, worried about my reaction, by the thought that my mum was just over there, in A Block. I could just walk over there.

My boomed in my throat. The distance through the window foreshortened. I could reach out and touch A Block. “Is she okay?” I’m pretty sure I did ask that. I think I also asked if I could visit. That was a maybe, depends. I have a vague recollection that I was allowed over there at some point. I think.

I don’t know where Dad was at this time. He might have been off in one of the secret spy hospitals again. It was a horrible time for us Bedfords. We were in rotten strife. We were all in wars.

My fault, naturally.

I was not exactly thriving in D20. Not just yet. It was still hammering me into pieces, so it could then refashion me into a better, more pleasing form. My parents did not understand this. That there was something as much Arts & Crafts as well as Psychiatric about what was happening. I was being upgraded. I didn’t understand any of this while it was happening. At the time I was very angry, and took it out on my poor parents. My dad returned fire.

I mention all this to give proper context for the incident with the outboard motor, when I was a kid.

As you’ll recall, Dad had the engine clutched to his chest. He wanted to transfer it to a nearby tinny boat. Mum, holding the rope, saw she’d let the boat drift while she was distracted, and yanked on the rope to pull the boat back. She didn’t want to get yelled at again. And Dad was in one of his moods again, yelling at seagulls if they pissed him off just so.

Mum brought the boat over, and Dad got ready, but just as Dad went to dump the engine somehow the boat slipped aside anyway. Mum and Dad’s recollections are not clear on this moment. But the upshot is clear: Dad and motor fell into the water with a huge splash! I still remember the splash. The two of them were completely submerged. I remember the water closing over man and engine.

It was astonishing. There was a pause as we up on the walkway, Mum still holding the boat rope, took in what had just happened.

Then Dad emerged, thunderous, furious, spluttering, from the water, a volcano rising from the ocean. His titanic anger so great it has echoed down the decades in family legend. He let fly, and abused Mum and–

Sorry, but we were all much too busy laughing. And this is the point of the whole story. We laughed. We laughed and laughed and laughed. We laughed our guts out. We laughed like we had never laughed before and seldom since. The bully had been rendered ridiculous. He looked like a drowned cat down there sputtering and yelling, and it was hilarious. He looked small and pitiful. We couldn’t believe we had been afraid of this soggy bastard’s fury for so long.

And our laughter only made him angrier. It was the funniest, most cathartic thing ever. The tyrant brought down to size. He was one of us again.

It took him a while, but by later that evening, showered, dried off, in clean clothes, he admitted, grudgingly, that he could start to see the funny side of the whole thing.

And he did, as I said, just the other day insist I include this story, because it illustrates my dad’s character so well. He is a kind and decent man whose poorly illness rendered him monstrous, as mine made me feel monstrous. He was consumed with frustration and anger, but it was all just his illness. Now, elderly, he is a sweet old man. He loves nothing better than sitting with our dog snoozing against him. He takes joy in all my doings. He’s interested in things. Concerned about his fading memory, but there’s a lot of that going around, I can report.

And that ten-horsepower outboard motor that got submerged in salt water? Ordinarily an accident like that would make the engine seize up inside and die. All the moving parts would lock up tight, encrusted with salt. But my dad was a genius with such things. And he had a full can of this stuff called CRC, a seriously water-repellent spray. He used almost an entire can on the stripped-down parts of that motor. It took two hours, but in the end he achieved a miracle, and the motor that had been fully submerged in salty water lived, roaring, screaming, again. My dad’s legend was burnished.